The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden is a thriller by Dot Hutchison, published in 2016. Its setting is an isolated mansion with a garden attached, and the garden is stocked with more than plants: young women have been taken and tattooed so that they resemble the butterflies whose names they are given.

They are cared for and preserved by a man they call the Gardener, who collects them the way a lepidopterist collects specimens. When the garden is discovered, one survivor is brought in for questioning, and the two agents handling the case, Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison, have to reconstruct what happened from an account that keeps changing shape.

The woman is known only as Maya, and she is a puzzle in her own right. Her story twists back on itself as she tells it, revealing the life of the garden gradually rather than all at once, and the book sets the investigators' need for a clean chronology against a witness who has her own reasons for controlling what they are allowed to learn.